The Manifesto of a True Believer, pt. 1

Greetings, Teen Board!
Thank you sooo much for being a part of the SPL! If you're not a Teen Board Member, join us! Or just attend an event or two that are designed JUST FOR YOU! Get caught up in adventures, quests, journeys, endless tales of worlds unknown and universes unseen! Visit our YA section and find a book that will take you to crazy star systems wrought by the hands of militant aliens seeking galactic domination, or join a hero in taking up the lance to fell the rising of another darklord, OR maybe solve a mystery to save the world from undergoing the outbreak of the worst storm ever engineered by nanotechnology. Fall in love with the library all over again! No MATTER your current flavor of the COOLEST BOOKS EVER, be EXCITED about Books, texts, reading, diving, delving, pouring into that infinite school of the imagination. Be a counter-cultural REVOLUTIONARY and lead the REBELLION, standing against the million who are HELPLESSLY plugged into a THOUSAND different gadgets, smashing attention-spans and vaporizing brain cells, as island to their high-tech fixes. You can stand as a league aside, a league of your own, a band united together, above them, beyond that! Secure to yourself a lost and sacred art, the ability to pour into a mere list of black words, and from these letters, pull up an endless LEGION of possibilities so hard to be fathomed by some! What an opportunity that is!

It builds the mind, it stretches the intellectual capacity. It allows you to experience the interaction of peoples with an infinite possibility of situations, allowing you to discover different personalities, reactions, human functions. It allows you to relate to HEROES, to put yourself into the shoes of: elves, picking off beasts unheard of with an arrow-shot 100 yards long, and to conjure up from within you a heat, a fire, a BURNING DESIRE to being thinking, creating, molding worlds anew on your own!

I remember when I was in the prime of my fantasy/D&D days...Oh, how the stories took me away! How I wanted to get to know characters, be a part of their lives and how I wanted to take them up and craft characters for myself. This but utterly COMPELLED me to sit down at my own desk,  BURNING with the want of high adventures of my own, and off I went!

I plotted and planned. I practiced writing, letting my brain flow and flex, pick up ideas from the way that professional authors would write, and also comparing so many genres of writing and story-telling. I checked out comic books, which I fell in love with, and also the old classics, whihc gave me such a further expanse of knowledge.

I was from these that I was able to begin crafting my own way of doing things, to begin calling myself "author". And thus, after 4 years, it was BORN!! The Realms of Annon, and the high adventures of Maob Gon'don and his cursed companion (he had been bit by a Sad'lokan, a vampiric-like wraith a long time ago giving some nasty side effects, such as albino flesh and fangs and the ability to phase through walls) Arian Hawkthorn, out to get into WAY to much trouble!

And WHOA! How sweet was it to do that! To begin living my own adventures, growing in that, developing from within myself an ART that could truly move me to places, that could truly move me to the ability of becoming an author.

WRITE! Create the adventures you want to go on. KEEP READING!! And SEE the treasures you will unpack! See all of the things that you will learn!! The things that you will feel compelled to aspire to! Oh!! The possibilities!

It was from the Dragonlance books that I learned about integrity and dignity and Raistlin who taught me that, thought someone could seem completely enraptured by the hideousness of consuming POWER, that they still held the potential to do good and have goodness within them, and it was from Caramon that I learned that people I didn't like so much, because they seemed evil to me, could still be loved by me, and treated with respect ahd heroic patience; that sometimes I could learn from the gifts that they had and, hopefully, they could one day be loved back to the forces of light!

And it was Taz who taught me just how the meek, the small, the seemingly useless could still rise to save the day, and it was the half-elf who showed me that we are all forever struggling to find ourselves, knew ourselves, discover our identity in a world so confusing and in a world so twisted and seemingly filled with darkness, sometimes choosing to hate us so. And from Kitiara and from 1000 other sword bearing women from across the realms of fantasy, that women could and can stand up for themselves and be tough and battle ready, and that they can play with the big boys and wield world-ending powers and kingdom-conquering devices, and that they should NEVER be undermined, never be underestimated, but instead the exact opposite, that they should be uplifted and upheld and esteemed and valued and honored, because they compliment and complete the world, and without them we wouldn't be anywhere, we would get nowhere, we would be a race doomed to destruction...

I Am In Control

Do you have questions about your health, your body, your sexuality or anything else about your life? Check out a new blog called www.IAMINCONTROL.org to find answers to your questions and learn how you can take control of your life. Hear from teens like you and health experts on topics like...

• Alcohol, Tobacco & Drugs
• Body Image
• Bullying & Suicide
• Fitness & Nutrition
• Like Skills
• Social Skills
• Teen Pregnancy & Sexual Health

A "live chat" feature is also available if you need more information on a health topic. If you would like  to talk to a teen counselor, you can call the Teen Line at 1-800-443-8336, 24 hours a day, seven days a week!

IAMINCONTROL.org was developed by Iowa State University Extension & Outreach with funding provided by theIowa Department of Public Health.